How to Defragment Your Disk
When you add files to a new disk, they're stored together, with a large continuous area of free space at the end. As files are added and removed from your computer, two things happen:
- Firstly, as files are removed, you get small, isolated areas of free space scattered throughout the disk.
- Secondly, instead of being stored on disk in one piece, individual files can become fragmented – split across multiple locations on the disk. This can happen if a file needs to expand (because you've added content to it), but the part of the disk immediately following that file is already in use. It can also happen if, due to the free disk space being scattered throughout the disk, there isn't a single area of free space large enough to accommodate it.
The end result is that your computer's performance is degraded. When it needs to access a file that is fragmented, it's obviously less efficient to have to read it from multiple different areas of the disk. Thankfully, these effects can be minimised by running the Disk Defragmenter, which attempts to correct these problems.
In Vista, defragmentation is usually set to run automatically, so you probably don't need to do anything except verify that this is the case.
If you run the disk defragmenter from the Start menu -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Defragmenter, you'll see a window like the one below.
In this case, you'll see that the "Run on a schedule" box is checked, which is what you want. It also tells you that defragmentation is set to run every Wednesday at 01:00, and the dates and times of the last and next scheduled runs. So, in this case, there's nothing more for you to do, unless you want to change the schedule via the "Modify schedule ..." button.
If you did want to run defragmentation manually, you could also do this via the "Defragment now" button.
If you're used to defragmentation in Windows XP, you'll see that Vista doesn't provide the same graphical view of the progress of the defragmentation task. Microsoft say that because of the way that defragmentation works, it's difficult to give a realistic representation of progress, so they've deliberately removed this in Vista.
Whether you're picking a time for defragmentation to run automatically, or starting it manually, bear in mind that it takes a long time (it could take several hours). So make sure you pick a time when you're not going to need your computer for a while.
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